Joseph Cornell

Chronology of Coverage

Dec. 2, 2012

Julie Bloom reviews book Joseph Cornell's Manual of Marvels: How Joseph Cornell Reinvented a French Agricultural Manual to Create an American Masterpiece, edited by Analisa Leppanen-Guerra and Dickran Tashjian. MORE

From 1929 until his death in 1972, Joseph Cornell spent much of his time at home in Queens, caring for his sick mother and invalid brother. He had no life to speak of, no friends and very little in the way of physical relationships. What he did have was his art, box assemblages made at night in the basement.

Using bits and pieces of the real world, the assemblagist Joseph Cornell (1903-72) built tiny dreamlike universes that have a haunting power. A fragment of a zodiacal map, an exotic postage stamp, a broken wine glass, a remnant of clay bubble pipe, a colored ball or two, a portrait of a Medici princess: he arranged parts like these behind the glass front of a wooden case to make a whole that embodied his obsessive but often enchanting nostalgias.

Joseph Cornell is officially known as an American Surrealist, but he might better be described as a homebody artist. Cornell, a thin, gray wraith of a man, was like one of the odd-duck daydreamers in an Anne Tyler novel. Day in and day out, he sat home on Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens, sipping tea in his tiny kitchen as he wrote in his journals and mused on ballerinas who had lived a century earlier.

With his famous shadow boxes, Joseph Cornell took the flotsam of daily life -- cheap wine glasses, broken dolls, tiny medicine bottles, rusting thimbles, old cork stoppers and paper cutouts -- and invested them with the luminous permanence of art. In works like ''Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall,'' ''Medici Princess,'' ''Roses des Vents'' and ''The Hotel Eden,'' the real is transformed into the surreal, the mundane into the magical: movie stars and paper parrots become iconic deities in Cornell's intimate world; children's toys, talismans of a remembered past.